Rivkah Rothschild, Esq. Responds to Article by Yossi Klein Halevi (YKH) in Jewish World, Oct 18-24, 2024
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-end-of-the-post-holocaust-era/
The analysis by YKH in his recent article called END OF THE POST-HOLOCAUST ERA leaves me breathless, but not out of admiration. It is not as much an inability to breathe as an inability to efficiently protest the untruths that Mr. Klein Halevi spews in his article by dressing them up in well- tailored garments. That was a mouthful, I know.
I agree with YKH that the dreams of a.) an Israeli military that prevents mass attacks on civilians, heavy with torture, rape, and kidnapping, and, b.) a North America that finally lays down the scrouge of Jew hatred and debunks the blood libels that support it, have both been dealt a formidable blow. It is not this truthful premise that YKH lays out with great skill and descriptive detail that I am going to attack, rather it is the political view he promotes on the back of these facts.
You see, YKH has an agenda that I will generously call Opposition to Bibi and the Right Wing Parties. If I wanted to be inflammatory, I would call his agenda Lies Calculated to Completely Undermine Support For Israel’s Current Government.
Using the devastation of the Jewish dreams for safety and stability in a hostile world to diss the ruling government and its leader is simply not okay. It is akin to kicking us when we are lying on the floor dressing our fresh and open wounds, with the smell of blood still heavy in the air.
Yes, Diaspora Jewry is reeling from the antisemitism that is both anti-Zionism, i.e., irrational hatred of the Jewish state, tied up with the irrational hatred of Jews as individuals, bundled up with hatred of all things Jewish, such as our institutions, organizations, and communities. And yes, we can discuss just how irrational it is for the world to blame Israel for a war mongering, terrorist-infested Middle East, as well as blame Jews for the ills of civilization, be they economic, societal, political or whatever.
The fact is that Jew hatred is irrational in all its various manifestations. So while we can ponder it and shed much light on its historical and ideological facets, we will, I believe, come to the end of the discussion with the very simple conclusion that, at its core, antisemitism heats up in a cauldron whose source is an impenetrable black-hole.
So much for my great insights into the scrouge of world history. I have a different bone to pick.
Our friendly commentator, author and journalist, Mr. Halevi, touted as a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jerusalem-based research institute and educational center, blithely explains that the American Jewish leadership has been unaware, unable, and/or unwilling to take on the settler-colonial narrative that holds the free world in a vice grip.
Well, that is far from the truth, although I have other complaints about American Jewish leadership. The American Jewish leadership, I propose, has been aware of the vice grip of intersectionality, with its nefarious narrative of the conquest by settler-colonialists of the Palestinian homeland, and has been desperately trying to counter it in the media and on campus. Its proponents are not a very nice bunch, as I think is apparent from media coverage of their protests. So when a pro-Israel speaker is slated to speak on campus, for example, the Students for Justice in Palestine and their sister organizations organize protesters to use force, for example, by lining up and blocking attendees from entering the venue, or by entering the venue and drowning out the speaker with From the River to the Sea and Globalize the Intifada chants. Furthermore, so much of the corporate media imbeds its antisemitism in language such as the following choice phrases, repeated without context and without communicating that there may be another narrative to consider, including:
• illegal Israeli occupation
• Israeli apartheid
• Islamic resistance movement
• Israeli settler colonialism
• Israel’s genocide
that it is far from straight forward to convey the truth to people that are already conditioned to believe in the colonial-aggressor versus indigenous-victim identifiers and narrative.
My gripe against YKH – l’havdil – is that he is using this same tactic, i.e., imbedding a political point of view in his narrative of the facts without any warning and without providing space for the reader to realize that this is a politicized point of view and consider alternatives that refute it.
For example, YKH tells his readers that a sacred trust between Israelis and the state has been broken because, according to him, the prime minister places his political needs ahead of the lives of Jewish captives.
I beg to differ. The prime minister ordered the assassination of key personnel from the terrorist regime landscape, including the likes of Mohammed Deif, Ismail Haniyeh, Hassan Nasrallah, Fuad Shukr and Yahya Sinwar. In my opinion, in doing so, Netanyahu put his own life at risk for the sake of the safety of Israeli citizens, since the retaliation for high-level assassinations is, notoriously, measure for measure. In fact, the assassinations he ordered did put his life in very real danger, as we have seen.
A prime minister who puts his life on the line for his country is a leader who knows and lives self- sacrifice for the greater good; he is not a petty politician who would nix a deal to save hostages’ lives because he calculates his career prospects in cold blood.
No, I don’t know Netanyahu personally, and those who do can shake their heads and call me naïve. I will shake my head in return, and call you cynical. Do you really know what goes on in the prime minister’s mind? Well, I don’t either. However, as an attorney I am trained to pay attention to nuance, to tone, and to body language. I watch the prime minister intently every time he speaks to the citizens of Israel, to the joint session of Congress, and in that darkest of all assemblies, the United Nations, and I can tell you this: All my training tells me that our prime minister is a true proponent of our land and our people; that he has stood up to foreign manipulation and pressure that would have caused 100 other seasoned politicians, all joined at the hip, to back down. He has handled the battles of arms procurement, mobilizing forces, calling up reserves, mourning the loss of young lives, fighting on so many fronts, with courage and fortitude, even when the Biden administration uses extortion and sabotage to undermine him and get him to accept its vision of the Middle East, which nefariously includes an appeased and nuclear Iran, an intact Hamas, a revitalized Palestinian Authority, and an intact Hezbollah. Not to mention the favorite of the administration, the “two state solution”.
Furthermore, I call out your statement that Netanyahu and most of his ministers lack empathy for the hostages and their families, because I am sure that you are aware that the government and the prime minister refused numerous opportunities to eliminate Sinwar, in spite of the great boost in support doing so would provide, because of the proximity of hostages. Sinwar was not eliminated until there were no hostages near him.
The daring rescues of hostages that were carried out during the past year, albeit there were only a handful due to the tunnels and Hamas’ efficiency in murdering informers, are evidence enough that the fate of the hostages was and is front and center to the government.
YKH, you owe Bibi and all of your readers an apology. To us, your readers, because your veiled attempt to undermine our faith in the prime minister and our government with presumptions and assumptions is debilitating, and we are already deeply traumatized from our enemies. I call on you to rethink what you have written regarding our government and prime minister.
I also call out your condemnation in your article of the Israeli far right, saying that they, whoever they may be, are ‘infecting us with evil”. Since you don’t identify who, or what, exactly constitutes the “Israeli far right” (in the US that would mean white supremacists, but in Israel that won’t work), or what evil you are referring to, I will just say that your accusations are cowardly and meaningless since you identify neither who you are referring to nor what they are doing that merits your blood libel. For someone that calls on Israeli society to go beyond its divisiveness, you present as the poorest of role models.
You also tell us that “we must own the consequences of our reclamation of power”, which is “the loss of our innocence”. While this sounds poetic, it seems to me that you have unintentionally crossed the line to join the antisemites of the world that fear and denounce a powerful Jewish state and a powerful Jewish community in the diaspora as something to be feared, attacked, disenfranchised, and ultimately down-graded and stripped of power. A state and a community do not lose innocence, that is for individuals. A state and a community gain in power and influence by design, and no other people or state anywhere in the world is chastised and penalized for having achieved power.
Lastly, I call to your attention that by way of omission you are unforgivably obscuring the truth when you write that the anti-Netanyahu protesters have been attacked by government supporters. You are certainly well aware that the protesters against the government have consistently acted with violence toward the prime minister – his home and family and members of his coalition – yet you make no mention of this fact. I wager that the score is more than three dozen to one in violence by the anti- government protesters to violence against them, and any journalist that doesn’t mention this fact is putting his or her own political agenda ahead of his or her journalistic honesty and integrity.